Valerie Preston-Dunlop has an MA in movement studies and her PhD in choreography. She is a consultant and Honorary Fellow of Trinity Laban. She conducted extensive research in the life and work of Rudolf Laban. She has written many books and directed DVDs that have contributed to the field of dance. She is a teacher, researcher, and dance scholar.
Dance career and research
At the age of sixteen, Preston-Dunlop began her training under Rudolf Laban in Manchester at the Art of Movement Studio, on completion receiving a Laban Diploma. She attended the School of Russian Ballet in London and worked with Albrecht Knust and Kurt Jooss at the Folkwangschule in Essen. She performed with British Dance Theatre. From 1953 she trained dance students in Colleges of Education. She opened Beechmont Movement Study Centre providing specialist courses in dance and dance notation and collaborating with Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Education on the possibility of designing the first BA degree course in Dance in the UK. After a short break for her family, she retrained gaining an Adv Diploma in Education, an MA in Movement Studies and a PHD in Choreology concurrently teaching and researching at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance until 2008. Preston-Dunlop is the acknowledged leader in the field of scholarship on the work of Rudolf Laban. Her recent work has focused on Laban’s dance theatre works where, with collaboration from dance and music artists at Trinity Laban London, she has directed dance works from Laban’s repertoire from the 1920s. She directed The American Invasion 1962-72, with Anna Carlisle. Her most recent DVD In Memoriam 2014 is a movement choir for all ages, made in the memorial year for the First World War. She featured throughout the BBC 4 documentary Dance Rebels. Preston-Dunlop’s AHRC funded research enabled her to create interactive maps of the multimedia creative processes in William Forsythe’s The Loss of Small Detail. She has established Choreological Studies as a key discipline for the integrated practical/theoretical study of dance as a theatre art. Her books on dance practice and on Rudolf Laban are key texts in Performing Arts departments in the UK and abroad Dr Preston-Dunlop is currently Consultant and Honorary Fellow at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, her autobiography Moving with the Times is published in 2017 by Noverre Press.
Publications
Books
Handbook for Modern Educational Dance, published as Dance in Education
